Making sense of this crazy world
I am a student of history, a teacher of history and a writer of history. You could say history is a passion of mine. I have a website for students and I had been mulling around this idea of a podcast for some time. Would people be interested? Would I make it interesting? That’s essentially what was holding me back. But with a new year starting, the craziness still all around us, I thought what the hell – give it a go, John! The primary purpose of the podcast is to use history to help us make a little more sense of this crazy world we are living in. I aim to do this by using history. It’s not the only tool to be used, but it is my chosen tool. Everything happens in a context and that context is recent history. But that recent history is almost always the result of older history. We have to go back into our past to understand today. I could easily rattle off a hundred other aims but trust me, they will be introduced as we go along. But there are two other aims I must own up to straight away. The first is that I really want to lay it on the line that history is always about people. I think it was the great historian, Eric Hobsbawm who said unemployment is an economic statistic but a human experience. And you can’t appear to be further away from people than with dry statistics – but you’re not. And the second is that there is always more than one story to tell; more than one “truth”. History is an interpretation of the past, nothing more. There are always other interpretations. When we look at this crazy world of ours today and try to make sense of what is happening, it is so important to bear that in mind - someone else thinks differently. And if we don’t understand that other interpretation, if we don’t even know it exists, then we can’t reach an understanding of what is happening. And our truth is less secure! I hope that makes sense.
Listen on:
Episodes
4 days ago
4 days ago
The fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime took us all by surprise. The armed coalition, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), put an end to over fifty years of the Assad family’s rule of Syria. And I want to explore how first Hafez al-Assad, and then Bashar al-Assad, got to power and what they did in power. In other words, how did we get to where we are today?
Sunday Mar 16, 2025
Sunday Mar 16, 2025
A peaceful, people-led, revolution against Syrian occupation, Hezbollah attacks on Israel and another Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
With the Israeli’s and the Christian Maronites both eager to cement their relationship and control Syria, and with Syria determined that they should be the leading player in Lebanon and so be the leading player in the Arab world’s settlement with Israel, and with the root of the problem – the question of a Palestinian state – unresolved – nothing was settled in Lebanon. Far from it.
Sunday Mar 02, 2025
Sunday Mar 02, 2025
Civil war broke out in Lebanon for a second time in 1975, partly as a result of the communal divisions in Lebanon but partly as a result of communal relationships with Syria and Israel, and because of the Arab world's conflict with Israel. But the consequences of the civil war would do nothing to ease the situation with regard to Israel.
Sunday Feb 23, 2025
Sunday Feb 23, 2025
In this, my last episode looking at the impact of the Cold War on the Middle East, I’m going to take us to the end of the Cold War and the part Afghanistan played in the Soviet Union's collapse.
Sunday Feb 16, 2025
Sunday Feb 16, 2025
Both America and the Soviet Union continued to build links with the region at every opportunity. But Iran and Iraq made it an unsettling, uncertain experience.
Sunday Feb 09, 2025
Sunday Feb 09, 2025
I thought it important in this long series looking at the Middle East and how we got to where we are today, to include a look at how the Cold War affected what unfolded. And this episode will begin that look in the 1950s.
Sunday Feb 02, 2025
Sunday Feb 02, 2025
From the prison massacres in 1988 to the Mahsa Amini protests that started in 2022, this episode takes a look at just what it is that so many Iranians oppose and how the Iranian theocracy has dealt with that opposition.
Sunday Jan 26, 2025
Sunday Jan 26, 2025
If you could sum up the impact of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in a sentence, it would be something like, ‘At one and the same time, Iran has dangerously widened the Sunni-Shia split that divides Muslims whilst becoming the rallying point for the Islamic anti-imperialist, anti-American and anti-Israeli movement.’ I'm going to add a little to this sentence!
Sunday Jan 19, 2025
Sunday Jan 19, 2025
We’ve been looking at really serious things with regard to Iran; and very worrying too. But the thing that has worried the West the most is undoubtedly Iran’s nuclear programme, and that's the focus of this episode.